Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a Tibetan meditation teacher, presented a wonderful meditation retreat this weekend. Rinpoche, as everyone called him, was delightfully funny ("I go to comedy school; no not really!"), with most of that humor self-directed about his life and English. Much laughter on the third day when we and Rinpoche realized simultaneously that a phrase he had frequently used: 'balah, balah, balah', meaning mental jabber or monkey mind, was his interpretation of the American 'blah, blah, blah'. How we all missed, and got it, together.
The essence of the teaching was how one can turn distractions from hinderances to meditation to help for meditation. So, we learned how background noise can be turned from an annoyance to an object of focus for meditation. Similarly with pain, sleepiness, runaway toughts, and emotions. Thus, just as we can meditate on a lovely object, we can meditate on noise, pain sensation, monkey mind, and so on. Rinpoche recounted his own discovery of this in his use of meditation to overcome panic attacks, as seen in this video:
As as I learned to meditate, I suffered through such distractions, and they made the practice difficult. I have also watched many fail to take up a practice because the distractions overwhelmed them. Not surprisingly, I fell in love with this teaching. I continue my own passage meditation practice, but plan to use these techniques when I'm distracted, and plan to use them when I teach others. And I've started to do that, with a brief teaching of meditation basics to the outpatient psych group at the hospital. Being able to give learners choices allowed us to move past the "I tried it before - it didn't work" or "That will never work for me" objections to some fruitful exploration of mindfulness.
Image from http://www.wisdom-books.com/, video originally from http://www.mingyur.org/
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